


When You Assume...

by Crankygrrl



Category: Farscape, Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Crossover, The Apocalypse, Weird places your brain goes after too much TV, pure self-indulgence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-05
Updated: 2009-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-16 07:17:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10566327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crankygrrl/pseuds/Crankygrrl
Summary: John Crichton meets John Connor





	

Crichton walked into the access room that served as Connor's quarters. They'd torn out the pipes - probably to melt down or Macguyver into armour - and someone had made an attempt at mortaring over the holes in the cinderblock but like the rest of the tunnel complex, it was damp, dark, cold and smelled of rat shit, sweat and fear.

A narrow, steel-frame bed made up with a rumpled sleeping bag was shoved against the far wall, an AR-15 semi-automatic resting on the mattress. Old ultility shelves filled with crates of ammunition and all sizes of pistols, shotguns and rifles, and a plastic folding table covered with electronics, tools and various papers took up the rest of the space. Connor and Reese stood in the far corner by the bed, speaking lowly to each other. As Crichton stepped through the door, Connor sagged, his head falling forward to rest against hers.

Three days after Moya came out of Starburst over the floating cinder that had once been his beautiful blue-green planet, Crichton still didn't quite believe any of it was real. He'd walked through the rubble, seen what was left of Edwards, gone on recon with Connor's people, seen the machines for himself... He married an alien for fucksake and Crichton still hoped he'd wake up on Moya and this would all be some horrible, grilled cheese and Hynerian marjules sandwich-fueled dream.

Connor made holding onto to that fantasy damned impossible. What Crichton had been expecting from the resistance leader he didn't know but John Connor hadn't been it. Civilian not military but trained to use his weapons (trained well, according to Aeryn, who would know), he didn't wear stars or bars on his uniform, he didn't even have an official title (robot-smasher-in-chief, he called himself). Crichton missed him at first, seeing only a lean, hard-faced, grey-haired man, wearing a jumble of leather, fatigues and tactical gear, mixing in with the knot of fighters that had met the pod and escorted them underground. Missed the way Reese stayed between him and them until they'd been walked past the dogs and searched. Missed the quicksilver glance between Connor and Reese before she returned their weapons (you see metal, you shoot first and then you run, she said, passing back Wynona butt-first. You stop to ask questions and you die). Aeryn saw it of course. When they were lead into the briefing area, a corner of what might have been an underground parking lot, she looked straight at Connor and asked him what happened.

Machines happened, he said. The singularity happened. Connor talked for a long time, laying it out for them: Skynet, Judgement Day, the rise of the machines and the beginnings of the resistance. When Connor talked, Crichton could see it - the conviction, the passion that inspired. He was well-spoken and he knew how to hold an audience, telling them not just what they needed to know but what they needed to hear. And then Connor paused and looked hard at them and asked them for help.

And Crichton knew there was only one answer he could give.

That was three days ago. John Crichton had been a fugitive, he'd been hunted, worn ragged and raw and pushed until he had nothing left to give. On those days, he dreamed about coming home to Earth, sitting on the dock with a line in the water and a beer in hand and doing nothing but passing the occasional word with his old man. The fantasy got embroidered over time - Aeryn joined the fishing party, then Little D - but the basics had never changed: Dad, beer, water, sun, Earth.

According to Connor, the Eastern Seaboard was pretty much gone. First nukes then an outraged mother nature took over, wiping away what remained in series of apocalyptic hurricanes that raged for months.

Those who survived had moved inland and met the machines. Out in the open, the survivors were easy pickings for the extermination 'bots. But in the cities, in the nuked-out ruins, where human beings could worry their way through rubble like rats, into spaces where machines couldn't get, there people started fighting, had been fighting for over a decade in conditions that made Crichton's worst days look not half bad in comparison.

He'd asked, and Reese had taken him and Aeryn on a tour, shown them their logistics operations, the makeshift hospital, the refugee camps. Everyone who fought or worked got fed, she explained, but there was never enough. And the others? She told him you can't save everyone, sounding like she knew what it was to try and fail.

The survivors lived anywhere difficult for a machine to get - tunnels, basements, makeshift caves carved out of fallen skyscrapers. Crichton and Aeryn followed Reese down stairs, through hatches, over barricades, around pit-traps and deadfalls, and when they were done and making their way back to the resistance's camp, he asked about children. There were nurseries, she said, here and there, safe as they could make'em. But they needed fighters more than mothers or there wouldn't be a next generation.

And hers? He'd seen her with two, a girl and a boy, maybe 12, 13, lean and blonde with her green eyes. With their father, she said and jerked her thumb up, towards the surface.

Crichton imagined D'argo at 12, Aeryn's features on a little boy's face, imagined giving him a rifle, teaching him to be a soldier when he should be playing Pop Warner.

He asked how she met her husband, remembering the gold ring around her finger under the shooter's gloves. Reese told him it was a long story but she'd smiled as she'd said it and when they got back, Connor had been waiting for her.

Then, he'd watched them put their heads together, black and grey, over a map while Connor sketched out a mission to hit a possible Skynet firebase. Saw the squeeze she gave his arm as she left, rifle in hand, saw Connor watch her go, her rag-tag pack of soldiers in tow.

Then, as now, as Reese leaned into Connor and held tight, her finger splayed through the short grey hair at his nape, Crichton knew he'd intruded on something not meant to be seen. He stopped suddenly in the doorway, bringing Aeryn up short behind him.

Reese's hand fell to the gun at her hip. Connor gripped the machine gun hanging from the sling at his side. They turned as one towards the noise of Crichton's footfall. This was not a place where you entered a room without knocking.

He cleared his throat. "Sorry, the pod's ready to leave. Pilot says we've got a five minute satellite window."

Connor looked to Reese, "You ready?"

She picked up the carbine from bed. "All I need is to collect Cameron from the body shop and we're good to go."

She glanced darkly at Crichton and Aeryn standing in the doorway before she brushed an awkward kiss against Connor's cheek, pressing something into his hand. "Tell Jenny and TJ I love them... in case."

Crichton turned in the doorway to let her past. The woman moved with an unsettling amount of purpose, enough to make Aeryn look damn near nonchalant. He turned back to Connor, catching him fiddling with a ragged Polaroid. He slid it into a pocket on his tac vest and sealed the velcro flap over it.

"Sorry about walking in on you, there. You're uh, Perry, didn't, um..." Crichton rubbed the back of his neck. "I didn't mean to intrude on you and your wife-"

"My what?" Connor looked like he smelled a fart. "My wife? God, no - Sarah's my mother."

Shock brought out the pure California in his accent and laughter shook some of the hard set and the years from his face, changing from a man in his 40s to one barely out of his 20s before Crichton's eyes.

Behind him, Aeryn murmured I told you so in Sebacean while Crichton's ears pinked. "Aw, hell, I'm sorry. No one said-"

"Don't worry about it. We don't talk about it much." Connor grinned. "'Wife', hah."

He led them out in the tunnels, "Mom'll love that one.

"Or she might deck you."

"Yeah," Crichton stifled the urge to look over his shoulder where Aeryn, cool and superior, followed. "I know the type."

She punched him in the back of the shoulder anyway. 

 


End file.
